A few years back, the ever-contentious lyrics-annotation startup Rap Genius instituted what it called a "blog affiliate program." In exchange for bloggers posting links to individual Rap Genius song pages—a page per track on an album—the platform would link back to their blogs. In essence, this SEO quid-pro-quo was a way of tricking Google into artificially boosting Rap Genius’ search results. Google wasn’t happy upon hearing of the trick, however, and took the extreme step of temporarily banishing Rap Genius to the far catacombs of its search results—a "time-out" for bad search-query behavior. Almost exactly a year later, Google intervened in the lucrative lyric-searching market in a different, much more direct way: For lots of (but not all) lyric queries, Google now returns an embedded result from its Knowledge Graph database, a straightforwardly encyclopedic addendum to the search engine’s market-cornering aptitude at returning relevant links. The lyrics, of course, also link to the song on Google Play.

This past January, when The New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones announced he was leaving the magazine after 11 years to assume an executive editor position at Genius (which has dropped the "Rap" as part of its ongoing expansion and which has acquired nearly $60 million in two rounds of funding, the latest coming from Cleveland Cavaliers owner and Quicken Loans magnate Dan Gilbert), it felt a bit like the embattled startup’s response to Google’s newly asserted dominion over lyric searching. Just like Knowledge Graph relies on old-media sources like encyclopedias, it appeared that Genius was going to significantly augment its crowdsourced annotation efforts with some good old-fashioned expert critical knowledge.

Kanye West is known as one of the greatest rappers and producers. He’s also known to make grandiose statements. His statements, while many interpret them as inspirational, are usually seen in the media as egomaniacal "rants". To that end, a debate rages across the Internet: Does Kanye have a God Complex? The answers to this question varies, depending on where you are on the fan-critic Kanye spectrum. But it can’t be denied that there’s a lot of venn diagram overlap between what Kanye says and does. We also know that Kanye often says things God does. The parallels are staggering, so we thought we’d pitch Kanye’s words against the Almighty himself. Can you tell the difference between the word of God and the word of Yeezus?

It's the latest Shake Appeal, Evan Minsker's garage/punk/psychedelic/etc. music round-up. Here at the start of 2015, there's been a lot of quality trash rock. (Some of which was written about in the previous installment.) Let's look at what's been good.

Welcome to Mixdown, an ongoing series where Pitchfork staffers and contributors talk about mixtapes, mixes, and other beat-based ephemera that may not be covered in our reviews section but are worth discussing. Today, Corban Goble, Meaghan Garvey, and Wesley Case talk about PeeWee Longway, OG Maco, and Johnny May Cash.

At the moment, every marginal Kanye West activity feels like a full-blown event, albeit one that is usually trying to get you to buy $350 sneakers. Yesterday, Kanye performed a new song called "All Day" at the BRIT Awards. We surveyed Pitchfork staffers for reactions to the performance.

Organs are everywhere these days. In the last two months we've seen the release of Áine O'Dwyer's Music for Church Cleaners Vol. I and II, a set of improvisations recorded on a church organ in London, and M. Dwinell's Golden Ratio, a series of just-intonation experiments for the electric organ. Last fall, the Entr'acte label put out Alfredo Costa Monteiro's Insula, a wild, forbidding recording based on a multi-channel installation for electric organ. And, just last week, Oneohtrix Point Never, Nico Muhly, and James McVinnie appeared at London's Barbican in a performance called "Twitchy Organs", after one of Muhly's compositions.

Then there's Cameron Carpenter, the Skrillex of the classical circuit, whose "Birth of the International Touring Organ" video has become something of a viral hit. The first time I saw the video, I assumed it was a spoof, like Spinal Tap for the tubular set, but Carpenter turns up in Alex Ross' recent New Yorker piece on the Walt Disney Concert Hall's earthshaking pipe organ, pulling out all the stops, figuratively and literally, on Scriabin's Fourth Sonata; he seems to be legit. (That Disney organ, by the way, is dubbed "Hurricane Mama"; that it was the raga-loving minimalist Terry Riley who gave the organ its name somehow makes it even funnier.) "A pipe organ can approximate the voice of God, but it also happily evokes a fairground calliope," writes Ross. "It is one of humanity's grander creations, and also one of its more durable technologies." Here are 10 releases charting the organ's revival in semi-popular music.

Britpop is back! We’ve been hearing so much of that these past few years, we’re starting to forget when it actually came back, or when it went away for that matter. Because at some point it did go away—at least the politically charged, quintessentially British version of Britpop did. Sure, the Brits are still making rock music, but even the Arctic Monkeys, with their heavy Sheffield accents, became an L.A. band eventually. For most other bands today, their Britishness is a sidebar, a bit of trivia.

It’s part of the reason why Britpop’s return is being welcomed with open arms. Anything with a time-capsuled signature—post-Thatcher, anti-grunge—does well for our nostalgia-obsessive culture. The genre, which peaked in the '90s, was marked by bands with mononymous names and one infamous feud between Blur and Oasis in 1995 that the media dubbed "Battle of Britpop." Whether it was innocuous or real depends on who you ask, but Britpop meant a lot to many music fans at the time. But come 21st century, many of those groups went on hiatuses, or quietly disappeared, only to return and wear the "comeback" badge loud and proud.

"Deliver me, oh my God, from my enemiesOh I flee unto thee to hide meCause me to hear thy love and kindness in morningFor in thee do I trust, cause me to walk in thy way…"

"Deliver Me From My Enemies" – Vivian Jackson & The Prophets (1972)

Jamaican reggae artist Yabby You’s epic new three-disc box set opens with "Deliver Me From My Enemies", a song where his vocals ache with conviction as he interprets verses from the Book of Psalms. It’s the sound of an artist who had suffered and was suffering still, physically and economically, but not spiritually. This disposition endeared him to his ghetto peers even as he faced rejection from wider society. Though Sly & Robbie, the Clash and the Wailers bassist Aston "Family Man" Barrett revered his music, Yabby You remained obscure to most reggae fans.

The searing work on Dread Prophecy: The Strange and Wonderful Story of Yabby You showcases an artist who deserves recognition on par with Bob Marley, Augustus Pablo or Burning Spear and hopefully elevates his legacy from its outsider status. Sadly, during his life, Yabby You (born Vivian Jackson) was doubly shunned: For being a dreadlocked youth who lived among Rastafarians at a time when they were despised by middle class Jamaicans, and also as an ardent Christian who rejected his Rasta brethren’s veneration of Haile Selassie as God.

When the dust settles on Kim Gordon's Girl In A Band, what shouldn't be forgotten is that above all, Sonic Youth were a band that for three decades, fearlessly expanded and enriched the vocabulary of rock and roll. Their legacy includes classic albums, a rich and ongoing influence on today's musical landscape, and a sprawling archive of live performances.

Perhaps reflective of guitarist Lee Ranaldo's Deadhead past, the band has always had a laissez faire attitude toward the proliferation of unofficial live tapes—there's even a section on their official message board entitled "Sonic Sharing" that encourages such activities. A deep dive into Sonic Youth's various onstage eras serves as a potent reminder that the band left behind plenty of "screaming fields of sonic love" for fans to explore.